Despite the semantic web targets being an "extension of the current web"
we experienced a lack of applications and tools for the most widespread
web development technology - namely PHP. Since the beginning of this
year we thus started to develop an integrated ontology editing and
management solution using this technology with name "pOWL". It covers
database model storage, layered RDF-S/OWL APIs (for convenient access by
PHP programmers) and a web based user interface for collaborative
ontology development.
We now reached Beta quality stage where feedback about existing
insufficiencies, missing features and future development directions is
desirable.
On the other hand pOWL is already productively used in serveral
projects, it was downloaded about 400 times so far and the seven
development team members release enhanced versions every 6-8 weeks.
Version 0.71 was just published and may be downloaded from the
SourceForge project page: http://sf.net/projects/powl .
Further information about pOWL is to be found at:
http://powl.sourceforge.net
Features include:
* Support for viewing, editing of RDFS/OWL ontologies of arbitrary size.
* Sophisticated widgets for data editing.
* Questioning the knowledge base with RDQL (query builder) or
full-text search.
* pOWL is extensible via it's plug-in concept.
* Object oriented API for accessing RDF-S and OWL.
* Versioning. All edits of a knowledge base may be logged and rolled
back.
* Scalability. Models are stored in database tables and only those
parts of the model are loaded into main memory which are actually needed.
* Multi language support.
* Easy deployment.
pOWL is released under GNU Public Licence (GPL).
SÃ¶ren Auer
on behalf of the pOWL development team
--------------------------------------------------------------
SÃ¶ren Auer - University of Leipzig - Dept. of Computer Science
Room 5-52, Augustusplatz 10, 04109 Leipzig, +49 (341) 97-32323